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...potentially dangerous step. No one knows exactly how a withdrawal will affect the tentative global economic recovery - just as it is not clear, even now, whether interest-rate cuts and huge stimulus spending in the U.S. and elsewhere are resulting in sustainable economic growth. The world is in uncharted territory. Policymakers are acting on the fly, without much in the way of historical precedence to guide them...
...Federal Reserve is also talking the talk, although it is difficult to see how it can actually walk the walk. After a year of contraction, U.S. GDP grew 3.5% in the third quarter of this year, but the jobless rate has surged to 10.2%, the highest since 1983. Raising interest rates runs the risk of worsening unemployment. For the same reason, the U.S. cannot withdraw stimulus spending either, even though the U.S. budget deficit has topped a record $1.7 trillion. Last week, mortgage lender Fannie Mae reported $18.9 billion in third-quarter losses and said it needs another $15 billion...
...survey also found that teens' overall rate of daily exercise had not changed much since 1991, when the study sample was first asked to report their participation in gym classes in school and their level of physical activity at home. The percentage of teens attending daily gym class has stayed relatively steady since 1991; on average, the yearly change in the proportion of students participating was less than 1%. The percentage of ninth- through 12th-graders getting adequate levels of moderate physical activity - exercise such as slow bicycling, fast walking or pushing a lawn mower, which did not make participants...
...popularity shows, Switzerland has yet to make its peace with immigrants, despite how central to the economy they have been and - with a falling birth rate and aging population - are still. Postwar Switzerland was built by Italian "guest workers," many of whom eventually won the right to settle, and today perhaps a quarter of the nation's workforce are non-Swiss...
...blood. Take tennis superstar Roger Federer: his dad was born South African. Exceptionalism is out of fashion these days. (Well, unless you're Chinese.) Global recession is a great leveler, its seismic shocks felt in big and small nations alike. Even Switzerland has not escaped the carnage. Its unemployment rate is at its highest for more than 11 years, and those fathomless repositories of Swiss-ness, the banks, are reeling from their exposure to sub-primes and credit markets. Switzerland's two biggest banks needed multibillion-dollar bailouts - UBS with public money, Credit Suisse with private - and, like bankers everywhere...